Sunday Classics: 15 (well, actually 16) ways to start an opera, courtesy of Richard Strauss

The opening of Act I of Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier in the film made at the 1961 Salzburg Festival, with Sena Jurinac as Octavian and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf as the Marschallin, staged by Paul Czinner, with Herbert von Karajan conducting the Vienna Philharmonic -- a new DVD and Blu-Ray issue is scheduled for Nov. 16.

by Ken

We've already done this with Puccini, gathering the openings of all the mature operas in one post: "Is this any way to start an opera? (Puccini thought so)." Whether it makes complete sense to do the same with the operas of Richard Strauss isn't clear, and there's always the possibility, as I suggested already, that we may be doing it just 'cause we can.

Like Puccini, Strauss early on abandoned formal overtures or even less formal preludes. But where Puccini tended to follow a pattern of a substantial orchestral introduction setting the stage for a logically following opening scene, making it relatively neat and sensible to present all those openings first as the orchestra-only introduction and then in extended form as the introduction plus opening scen, Strauss sometimes did something like this and sometimes plunged right into the dramatic scene. Still, if nothing else, going through all 15 Strauss opera openings gives us the opportunity to sketch their range, musically and dramatically.

We started Friday night's preview with the openings of the first two (Guntram and Feuersnot) and last two (Die Liebe der Danae and Capriccio) of the 15. Then last night we took peeks at Strauss's best-loved operas, Der Rosenkavalier and Ariadne auf Naxos. They're all included again in today's "complete" survey (and in all-different performances!).

Given how much ground we have to cover just getting through our 15 openings, I early on gave up on the idea of doing, as we did with Puccini, both an introduction-only and an introduction-plus-scene format. As it happens, though, most of the remaining 11 operas are pieces I would definitely like to come back to, and we might even continue working our way through them moving forward from the start and backward from from the finish, just adding something to the opening which will give a better sense of the piece.

WE'LL BE COMING BACK TO THIS
PROJECT AT UNSPECIFIED INTERVALS

* Next up would be two pairs of naturally paired one-act operas: Nos. 3 and 4, Salome and Elektra, and Nos. 12 and 13, Friedenstag and Daphne, which were originally conceived to form a double bill.

* Then we would have two operas we've already talked about a lot, Nos. 5 and 6, Der Rosenkavalier and Ariadne auf Naxos, and I have really very little to say about, Arabella and Die schweigsame Frau.

* Which would leaves us with a truly wonderful unit of Nos. 7-9: Die Frau ohne Schatten, Intermezzo, and Die ägyptische Helena (The Egyptian Helen), which I would choose as a "thematic" unit on purely artistic grounds, as Strauss's "marriage group," three operas that deal centrally with the marital bond.

SO LET'S GET ON WITH IT NOW . . .

Just click here!

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